


Locked Behind a Facade

by Passions



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-12-04 01:15:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/704792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Passions/pseuds/Passions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone wants to remove Belle from her position as her father's heir. Rumplestiltskin sees a pretty girl being schemed against in his mirror and decides to help her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Locked Behind a Facade

Andreas de Varnailles, Head Advisor to Sir Maurice d’Avalon, Lord of the Marches, stormed out of the council room in a towering rage. He occupied the highest seat on the council save for Sir Maurice himself and yet he had just had his plans rejected for the third time in the last four months. 

Maurice was entirely too wrapped up in his daughter, had been since she was born, but it had been getting steadily worse in the last few months. The girl had just turned twelve, a young lady now rather than a child, and Maurice was simpering over her more than ever as he had a new wardrobe commissioned and began to introduce her at his court.

The man had even begun to bring her to council meetings where he let her voice her opinions and actually listened to them. A lady oughtn’t to have strong opinions in the first place, but she was twelve! What sort of opinions could a twelve year old have? Ones that went against all of Andreas’ as far as he could tell. And with Maurice’s wife gone and with her no possibility of a son, Maurice had already made the Lady Belle heir to his holdings. And that didn’t bode well for Andreas’ ambitions. 

He had hoped to gain a great deal more control over the Marches once Maurice passed on, which he was likely to do, given the rising number of skirmishes the Marches were fighting against neighbouring villages. Not too many yet, but they’d fought two in the last two years after virtually no violence for the previous decade. Maurice always insisted on leading his men and the council would easily have accepted his death in battle and power would have fallen into Andreas’ lap. But now they all wanted to listen to the girl. Of course, that was only because Maurice doted on her so; listening to the child was in their best interests.

Andreas needed to find some way of getting the girl under his control so that when Maurice inevitably died, he’d have a foothold to build his control of the Marches from.

He pushed violently into his rooms to find his son waiting for him.

“Papa, Belle is going riding and she’s invited me along. May I go?”

Andreas was silent for a moment as thoughts whipped through his mind before he answered. “Yes of course, Gaston. Run along.”

After his son left Andreas dropped into the chair at his desk. Gaston and Belle were of an age and they seemed to be somewhat friendly already. And being her father in law would certainly be a good way to gain control over the outspoken little chit.

 

On Belle’s fifteenth birthday, Andreas encouraged Gaston to take her for a walk around the gardens, gift her with a pretty bauble, and perhaps kiss her. Throughout the rest of that year he tried to subtly encourage his son to woo the future Lady of the Marches. When he saw the two of them together he thought they seemed close, but he couldn’t be sure.

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, he proposed the marriage to Maurice. The bigger man seemed delighted by the idea, and Andreas began to hope. Unfortunately, Maurice never attempted to begin arrangements or even to broach the subject again, and he began making plans for Belle to take over rulership once she reached her majority. The fear caused by mounting political tensions making him wary. Andreas let it go until her seventeenth birthday before asking again. If she reached her majority and complete freedom to rule at eighteen before he had any control over her, he wouldn’t be able to create the proper foundation off of which to base a later control.

When Maurice rebuffed the marriage proposal, stating that Belle wasn’t ready to be married yet and that she would be the one to choose her husband when the time came, Andreas became worried. He fled to the library and the law textbooks in hopes of finding something that would hinder Belle’s coming of age.

He got lucky. According to the statutes of their land, while married women reached majority and independence to rule at eighteen, unmarried women were bereft of that independence until they reached twenty-four years of age. He happily presented this to the council, but it didn’t change Maurice’s plan to let his daughter choose her own husband when she felt the time was right.

But Andreas could relax slightly. Maurice was fairly easy to manipulate, and he was still the one in power. Belle would be much more difficult to control, but he now had extra time to work out a new plan. Extra time to push Belle and Gaston closer together.

When Belle turned twenty-one and still wasn’t accepting Gaston’s advances, Andreas was getting desperate. The political climate was getting ever more dangerous - they were getting reports from kingdoms some lengthy travels away of attacking ogres. And the epicentres of those attacks, far away as they were, were sending ripples even as far as the Marches. And by all accounts the ogres were steadily working their way east, in the direction of the Marches. Yet even as border skirmishes became more commonplace, Maurice continued to remain in good health and adamant that his daughter need not marry if she didn’t wish it. Since nature was failing to deal any damage to Maurice on his behalf, Andreas took matters into his own hands, slowly adding ever increasing amounts of poison to Maurice’s food; something that wouldn’t be detectable as poison - perhaps simply his heart giving out.

Andreas added ever increasing amounts of poison to Maurice’s food for a full year with no effect before acknowledging that it clearly wasn’t working and he had absolutely no idea why. Belle had just passed her twenty-second birthday; only two more years and she would be beyond any hope of his control. Maurice would cede his power to her as soon as she gained her majority and Andreas was well aware he would soon after lose his seat as Head Advisor of the council.

Andreas spent the next month locked in his office near constantly, scanning through the numerous books on sorcery and alchemy he had acquired over many years. He had a plan: draw the ogres closer to the Marches. Surely even Sir Maurice could not survive battle with them; Andreas only needed to find a way of moving them closer at a faster pace. It took him yet another month to gather everything he needed to perform his spell, and ensure he had all the details down correctly. And finally he was forced to wait another fortnight yet for a new moon.

 

Rumplestiltskin was sat in the tallest tower in his Dark Castle, experimenting with some new ingredients he had managed to acquire through his latest deal; trying to determine what spells and potions he might be able to incorporate them into. He felt a pulse go through his magic and left his experiments to pull the cover off of one of his smaller mirrors. Rumplestiltskin liked to say that he knew how to spot a desperate soul, and to some degree that was true - he’d been quite desperate himself, once upon a time. But the truer answer was that the magic of the Dark One preyed on desperation and so was keyed in to sense it.

Looking into the mirror, Rumplestiltskin was greeted by the image of a man: tall, thin, with long black hair tied back with a black ribbon. He was standing hunched over a work table fairly similar to Rumple’s own, bottling some sort of vivid green potion and placing it reverently by a stack of papers.

Rumple rewound the images in the mirror back slowly, gaining an ever growing understanding of the thin man and his goal. He wanted power - not an especially interesting goal, considering he had no driving reason for the desire. He just wanted to control other men, and he resented that he wasn’t able to. Rumple paused the mirror over an image of him being beaten during some sort of council meeting.

There was a woman arguing with him. Everyone else was turned to listen to her, including the man who was clearly the Lord of whatever area they were currently occupying, and from their comparative ages and how close she sat to his side could only be her father. She looked so incredibly passionate as she leaned across the table, her brow furrowed as she tried to explain something to this desperate man. They clearly didn’t get along and if she was the heir, Rumple could understand why the thin man felt the need to resort to magic to try to gain power. She wasn’t going to give it to him willingly and Rumple couldn’t fault her for that.

He rewound the mirror images further and found more altercations between that tall man he came to learn was Head Advisor and the beautiful young woman he learned was called Belle. He also found that the Advisor was making every attempt to get Belle settled with his son, though the girl had rebuffed him often enough. 

Moving forward again he saw the ever encroaching movement of the ogres - bloody slow beats - and, focussing more on Belle, he saw her growing despair at constantly fighting with the advisor, at her father’s fear of the ogres, and at the knowledge that if her father tried to pass rulership of the Marches to her without her being married, the people wouldn’t be as accepting of it as her father liked to think. 

She was aware that her father doted on her, but she was also aware he was growing weary of the responsibilities of power, eager to pass them on to her - she was unwilling to burden him further with any of her concerns. She was also aware that most of the council only listened to her to remain on her father’s good side - once he gave over control they wouldn’t accept her easily. She was considering marrying the advisor’s son, Gaston, in hopes of stabilizing the land she all but ruled over already, even though she had no romantic interest in the boy.

Rumplestiltskin was intrigued. From what he had seen the girl was bright; she could be a great ruler if given the chance, but she needed someone on her side. He could be that to her. And he relished the chance to overthrow whatever that advisor’s plans were, because whatever they were they certainly wouldn’t benefit anyone but himself.

And, to be honest, living alone for as long as he had was boring. He had hit a wall in his search for Bae and it wouldn’t hurt to have something as a distraction while he figured out how to work past it.

The passion in the girl’s eyes when she argued, and her near palpable worry for her father and her people didn’t figure in to the equation. Rumplestiltskin did not care about people.


End file.
